Saddam Hussein

The sadism of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s estranged elder son who tortured Iraqi Olympians and served three months in a private prison for murdering his father’s closest confidante, is documented well enough without The Devil’s Double.

Yet Lee Tamahori’s adaptation of the tell-all by Latif Yahia, who reluctantly served as Uday’s body double before fleeing Iraq in 1991, isn’t merely the lurid chronicle of a lunatic son of privilege, but also of an escalating battle of wills between a madman and his disapproving sidekick.

The creative pairing of Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass has yielded two gripping sequels to The Bourne Identity (2002) and now Green Zone, another skillful exercise in breakneck storytelling that finds Greengrass questioning the sincerity of America’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It is 2003, and Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is hunting for Saddam Hussein’s rumored WMDs, but finding little to justify his search, much less America’s occupation of foreign soil.